Spoilers and social justice
Pull up your chairs for a lesson in Spoilers and Social Justice. Shut up, this is important.
First of all – is it hypocritical to want spoiler alerts while thinking trigger warnings are out of hand or silly or both? Yes, yes it is. Thank you for asking that question. The answer is yes.
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get down to the real politics.
Spoiler warnings are an intersectional social justice and accessibility issue. For example, I am rarely able to experience media right away. I don’t get to see movies when they come out because I work a lot of hours, I’m a student, and I’m usually totally broke. Spoilers are a constant reminder that I’m too poor to have the benefit of seeing movies opening weekend (or even in the theater usually), too poor to watch shows on cable, or too poor to read books right away. Helping me to avoid spoilers by labeling them helps me to experience media the way people with more money and time than me get to experience that media. When I’m angsting about not wanting a movie spoiled for me, it’s not because I’m a hypocritical jackass. It’s because I’m a poor college student who has to wait a few weeks to see a movie I’m excited about but cannot afford the time or cash to see yet.
We just don’t think, do we. We forget all about poor people, shivering in their rags and unable to see the new Star Wars movie the day it opens. We just stride past them, holding out their sad little tin cups, on our way to buy a $200,000 T shirt and tickets to the new Star Wars movie.
From an accessibility perspective, there are many people with a wide variety of disabilities who may not be able to see a movie when it is in theaters, or who may not get through a book quickly.
That’s true, that’s true. I’d better stop talking about books, and articles too, because who knows how many people haven’t had time to “get through” them yet, who are nevertheless reading my blog posts?
People with PTSD, agoraphobia, or a myriad of other concerns may be unable to see a movie in a theater but will be thrilled to see the same film in their living rooms. I love to watch movies with my friend with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome, and would hate to have those movies spoiled for her just because her condition makes the loud sound systems of movie theaters intolerable. Should I feel free to spoil a book that my dyslexic friend is in the middle of reading just because I read it faster?
Hell no! That would be awful! That would be the worst kind of cishet white ablebodied privilege. I feel sick just thinking about it.
Trigger warnings are essential for making our writing, classes, and world more accessible for people. Spoiler warnings are, too. Let those of us who, for whatever reason, get to a piece of media after you enjoy it the same way you do. I know you’re a mega-fan who got to see Long Awaited Movie on opening day, but I have to wait until payday. Then I’ll go to the theater, with a pair of earplugs for the loud bits, and with your help I’ll get to experience it the same way you did on opening day.
I see Utopia arriving.
Oh wait, is that a spoiler?
is it possible to be careful enough and still leave your house?
Probably not. Better not to risk it.
I’ll just trigger myself while humming a tune and hope I don’t get spoiled.
By now most turkey rolls are out of season anyway, right? Old stuffing etc.
I think some of these folks need to read Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”
I think I have a general solution to the problem, one that stops short of federal legislation mandating spoiler alerts, although admittedly it may be a bit too radical and “outside the box” to catch on: If you don’t want to know what happens ahead of time in a new movie or book or TV show, maybe you should avoid reading about it?
Some would probably argue that it is impossible to avoid spoilers about “Star Wars: The Something Whatever” because it is such a massive cultural event that everyone everywhere is talking all about it in minute detail. To them I can only say that I have no idea what happens in it, other than that it probably involves aliens and robots and spaceships and laser-sword things, and a good guy in a white bathrobe and a bad guy in black. That is because I have not gone around reading what everyone who has already seen it is saying about it. Admittedly that is an easy temptation to resist when you have no interest in seeing the movie in the first place and you actually kind of wish that it didn’t exist, but I still have faith that Benny, too, is capable of managing such a feat of willpower and determination.
If the problem with spoilers is that they remind you if your (comparative) poverty that prevented you from seeing a movie right away, the headline “Star Wars New Movie Discussion (Warning: Spoilers)” is going to have the same effect. Whether you can or can’t see the specific spoilers is unrelated to the fact that the movie is out and other people have seen it and you haven’t. No one would have any spoilers to discuss if not for the fact that they’ve seen the movie.
So that part of the article is easily laughable.
Beyond that, there’s the argument that no posting spoilers (or clearly labeling them) permits people to experience the movie or book or whatnot the way it was intended. That part is pretty much true. Most fan communities are pretty particular about spoiler warnings, up to a point (of you’re hanging out on a Harry spotter forum this many years after both the books and the movies, the statute of limitations on spoiler warnings has expired, and if you haven’t yet read/watched them, it’s considered your responsibility to avoid the place).
The most interesting part of that section is what it says about social justice as a community. The author apparently couldn’t just say that it’s rude to spoil movies. Mere rudeness is not a norm issue for social justice. The dread specter of rudeness to a marginalized group had to be invoked. If your wealthy white male neighbor didn’t see Star Wars because he was in the Bahamas, people steeped in social justice have nothing to say about spoilers. They can only offer an opinion in the terms of social justice discourse, which means that a marginalized victim must be invoked.
It reminds me of reading Christian writing, where the author doesn’t like something, but completely lacks the language to just say that, or to claim that their own opinion is grounded, or is even worthwhile. By the norms of their community, their opinion is worthless. So he or she spins some tenuous narrative purporting to claim that God doesn’t like it.
Imagine if the energy put into nonsense like this were spent on, oh, I don’t know–fighting poverty?
Pssst, Benny, sweetheart–your concern is noted, but has fuckall to do with social justice.
#7 — Yes, that is part of the problem. To these people, “rudeness” has the horrid tinge of classism and/or conservatism. (This ignores the fact that societies have norms, and different rules for social behavior; and violating them is, indeed, rudeness. We need rules for behavior so that get along with other people and so that people don’t step on other people’s toes. What we don’t need is rules that make no sense, which is what the hippies were rebelling against.)
I suppose she could say, “Don’t be an asshole”, but that doesn’t have the same moral weight within the Social Justice community.
There are differences between mores, morals and laws.
Brilliant analogy.
Zubanel @5, not another word, you’ll spoil it for me.
A trigger warning is useful as it tells a person that e.g. an article is going to discuss a possibly distressing subject, such as recounting an assault. The reader can make an informed decision to avoid the article and thus spare themselves a PTSD episode. The principle at play is that the trigger warning allows a person to be spared from harm*.
A spoiler warning runs along the same basic principle. Information is provided, and the reader can thus spare themselves having a book, movie etc. …become less enjoyable than it might have been**. That’s it. It’s drastically less harmful to have a Star Wars plot point revealed in advance, because it isn’t really harm at all (and also because the movie was ridiculously predictable…).
So yes I agree that support for one should entail support for the other, and that supporting spoilers but denigrating trigger warnings is hypocritical, but the idea that forgoing spoilers is an ableism and income inequality issue is a bit precious.
* That said, they can be taken to a bit of a ludicrous place – I hace seen individual tweets start off with “tw: rape mention” for a tweet that contains the word ‘rape’. Not a discussion of rape, not an account of a real life event, just a mention of the word. Surely if the mere presence of the word is damaging enough enough to warrant a warning, the warning itself will do the damage? I think some people have lost sight of the fact that the idea behind the trigger warning is that a trigger is an actual psychological concept, and have instead been swept up in a trendy ‘look at how progressive I am’ thing.
** There are those that will disagree with my low key description, who will go on at length at how spoilers are about maintaining the purity and integrity (and so on) of a work. Their indignation and righteous outrage at the thought of having something deliberately spoiled can is often fucking amazing.
@GreatGodPan: “but I still have faith that Benny, too, is capable of managing such a feat of willpower and determination.”
for a deity you just don’t get it do you? Benny is not supposed to make any efforts in this; it is up to you, to me, to all the rest of us to spare him the macroagressions of failing to give him trigger and spoiler warnings.
@ 13 Holms
Oh, great. I haven’t seen it and now I know it’s ridiculously predictable.
Thanks, for contributing to my systemic oppression, Holms!
Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar.
Silly rabbits. Seems to me, when it comes to film, plot is almost everything to naive viewers, and usually the least interesting aspect to everyone else. I had a film studies instructor who made a point of telling us the plot of every movie before she screened it for us. That way we could concentrate on the film as film.
Thanks in part to that experience, I rarely give a damn about spoilers. Once in a great while, a good film has a clever plot twist or reveal that it’s fun to be surprised by (e.g., The Usual Suspects.) And for every one of those, there’s a mediocre film reliant on a gimmicky twist to make a name for itself (e.g., The Crying Game.)
A lot of y’all seem to be mocking the notion of consideration for other people. I find that odd.
^ Oh nice, apparently liking a good plot is a sign of naivety.
^That’s…not what I said.
Spoiler avoidance is a blurry issue of good manners. But if you require so much protection against ‘premature’ knowledge you should be able to NOT READ material on the subject.
‘Trigger warnings’ seem more sinister. At some point, dealing with shocking information is part of growing up. I certainly recall my deep shock reading the ‘Night and Fog’ chapter in ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,’ and James Baldwin’s description of a lynching in one of his short stories. Would I have been helped by being sheltered from the knowledge?
I’ve suffered some massive upsets in recent years. To the point that I can ‘officially’ claim PTSD. Now I’ve certainly experienced emotional explosions associated with memories…the sort of thing that gets called ‘triggering.’ Trouble is, the actual ‘triggers’ were completely unpredictable. No attempt to engineer some Special Safe Space for me would have worked at all.
John the Drunkard, TMK the people who use the warnings in trigger warnings aren’t sheltering themselves from information, they just want to be able to be ready when they approach it, not have it land on them out of the blue. And the need for trigger warning comes from not having been sheltered previously – usually these are people who have had seriously bad experiences, they know terrible things happen because something terrible has already happened to them personally.
Knowledge of what? That a story written by James Baldwin might contain reference to racist violence, that a book about the history of Nazi Germany might refer to war crimes and political persecution? Were you not already acquainted with Baldwin’s work, did you never hear of Nazis, was somebody sheltering you from either of these realities? Or are you referring not to the themes and events, but the details themselves? Were the details what shocked you? Why would a note about the general content of something (warning: Nazis ahead) be objectionable? Are you suggesting that someone would forgo reading Baldwin or Shirer altogether were they to encounter such a warning? If you are, I think you’re mistaking the purpose of such a note, which is not to discourage the reader from engaging with the material but to intellectually and emotionally prepare them for that engagement; I should think doing so would result in a closer, more thoughtful reading. Nobody approaching Shirer is going to be SHOCKED by the topic of the book — they probably have heard in passing once or twice about the general state of Europe and its nation-states prior to and during WWII, yes — and it’s disingenuous to pretend that they would be or that content warnings deprive people of an education. In general, work like you’re discussing is not consumed for escapism or mindless pleasure, but is regarded as edifying because it is challenging and provocative. Allowing the reader the opportunity to anticipate provocation, to forgo it a moment until they’re ready to read it, doesn’t seem worthy of so much hyperbolic distress nor does it make that reader an anti-intellectual or comically frail. People who ask for content warnings are taking art and literature and history quite seriously, it seems to me. Pace talk of special snowflake millennial free speech-trampling coddled brats, it feels oddly mature to disclose trauma and ask for a moment or two to prepare for potentially re-living that trauma to the extent that the reading has to be abandoned altogether or slogged through quickly for the sake of saying one did. Likewise, it’s okay, not censorship in the slightest, to decide to avoid reference to something when the mood strikes, okay to prioritize feelings or happiness or comfort at any time, okay to choose what battles one fights and when and where.